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All Gods are Real

What's really true about religion and myth

In Jungian thought--the investigation of which let me to the books of
Joseph Campbell, I found a “radical” approach to religion. Jung had
identified patterns of religious thought that seemed to prevail all
over the world. He pointed to deep archetypal patterns that made more
sense as symbolic images of the mind than as doctrines about
metaphysical reality. My interest in Jung was to have major
consequences and to create new sources of spiritual turmoil and
confusion in my life.

During my first year with the Servites, I found that something in me
had changed. I came home one afternoon to my room in the dorm where the
Servites lived, feeling a little perplexed by a statement about the
historical uniqueness of Christianity that had been made in a theology
class I’d just attended. From Jung and Campbell I’d learned that
Christianity was far from unique in being the “One, true religion” and
maybe even wasn’t the best of world religions.

My room was small, a room in a once-grand hotel that had slowly
deteriorated and then been bought by the University for a dormitory,
mainly for graduate students and members of religious orders who
attended the school. The walls were an old battleship gray. I had tried
to improve the appearance of the room by adding brightly colored
accessories. Among them were a number of psychedelic posters, including
the Richard Avedon photographs of the Beatles. (A year before I had had
my first experience with LSD, the easy access to mystical consciousness
Timothy Leary had promised.)

I stood for a while looking out the window at the traffic moving below,
wondering what was happening to me. Here I was a Roman Catholic
religious, yet somehow I knew that I had seen through the external
teachings of that religion. I no longer believed that that man Jesus
who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago was so different from the
other world saviors—from Prince Gautama, Mohammed, or Lao-tse, or, for
that matter, from any of the rest of us who struggle with deep
spiritual questions about the nature of our lives.

I turned and looked at a crucifix hanging on the wall. Even Biblical
scholarship told us we could never really know what happened that day
in Jerusalem. We could only learn of it through the filter of myth and
metaphor and the conventions of mystical poetry of the Near East.
Common sense told me Jesus was a man who’d taught about goodness and
the meaning of life and used those very conventions to talk about God.
He was caught up in the swirl of politics of his day and died a martyr
to his gentle message of love and respect preached to a culture based
on military power and patriarchal, legalistic dominance. In the poems
about him he was deified, as symbols were used by the writers to give
significance to the events of his life. Jesus wasn’t a god exactly who
incarnated to save the world by his death in order to repay a
sacrificial debt to an angry father-God. I no longer believed in the
historicity of such mythical, supernatural events. They were true as
metaphors about the Self in every human being, not as historical events.

I understood that Jesus’s crucifixion was important because of the
faith of two thousand years of believers who found in the religious
poetry a significance for their own lives and their own experience of
Self. I knew this was a religious sensibility, but how did it fit with
my identity as a canonical religious?
I turned away from the crucifix. My eye was caught by the poster on the
wall
opposite: Beatle George Harrison, in orange and green highlights, a
blazing psychedelic vision, his eyes upturned and his hand, marked with
a glyph of the all-seeing eye, raised in benediction, the mudra “fear
not.” And I realized that though I no longer believed in a specific
religious truth, I still believed in religious experience. I believed
in the possibility of mystical vision. And I saw what my identity as a
religious really was.

The point was not whether Jesus Christ was God, whether he rose again
on the third day and would lead us all into heaven in the end, but
whether the thought of him and his spiritual acts could lead us to the
kind of vision he had had and that was symbolized by the poster of
George Harrison. Somehow, in the moment of losing my faith, I found my
faith restored. Somehow I had seen beyond the surface of religion to
roots that sank deep into my soul and into the collective soul of
humanity.

Religion is about having "religious experience." It's about human
consciousness. God and the gods are symbols for awakening consciousness.

All the myths are true. All the gods are real—as potent metaphors.

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.